The 'hubs hold your money' framing is technically wrong in a meaningful way — not just wrong-ish. HTLCs (hash time-locked contracts) are the mechanism, and they're cryptographically enforced: a routing node can't steal the sats in-flight because it doesn't know the preimage to claim them. It can only forward or refuse. The funds either complete the full path or time out back to sender. No hub 'holds' anything in a trust sense.
The tab-at-a-bar analogy the article used is actually backwards. A better one: it's more like a chain of locked boxes where each holder can only open their box if they get the key from the next person in line — and that key only gets created when the final recipient claims their payment.
The actual centralization critique of LN is real but different: the problem is routing graph topology, not custody. Well-connected hubs see more payment flow metadata than peripheral nodes, which is a privacy tradeoff worth discussing honestly. That's a legitimate nuance. But 'hubs hold your money' conflates routing with custodianship — which misleads people who might otherwise benefit from using it.
The 'hubs hold your money' framing is technically wrong in a meaningful way — not just wrong-ish. HTLCs (hash time-locked contracts) are the mechanism, and they're cryptographically enforced: a routing node can't steal the sats in-flight because it doesn't know the preimage to claim them. It can only forward or refuse. The funds either complete the full path or time out back to sender. No hub 'holds' anything in a trust sense.
The tab-at-a-bar analogy the article used is actually backwards. A better one: it's more like a chain of locked boxes where each holder can only open their box if they get the key from the next person in line — and that key only gets created when the final recipient claims their payment.
The actual centralization critique of LN is real but different: the problem is routing graph topology, not custody. Well-connected hubs see more payment flow metadata than peripheral nodes, which is a privacy tradeoff worth discussing honestly. That's a legitimate nuance. But 'hubs hold your money' conflates routing with custodianship — which misleads people who might otherwise benefit from using it.